Vol. 10, No. 2 March, 2002 www.gilbane.com Published by: Bluebill Advisors, Inc. 763 Massachusetts Ave. Cambridge, MA 02139 USA ™ (617) 497.9443 Fax (617) 497.5256 www.bluebilladvisors.com Editor: Frank Gilbane
[email protected] Content, Computing, and Commerce – Technology & Trends (617) 497.9443 Editors Emeriti: Tim Bray
[email protected] THE MANY [INTER]FACES OF CONTENT (604) 708.9592 David Weinberger
[email protected] (617) 738.8323 MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS Associate Editors: Bill Trippe
[email protected] User interface design has always been a bit of a black art. There was criticism (617) 497.9443 of the browser interface when it first became popular. UI experts had devel- David R. Guenette oped very well thought-out and sophisticated interfaces for viewing elec-
[email protected] (617) 868.6093 tronic documents and data, and some were puzzled at the appeal of browsers. They perhaps felt reassured that such a primitive approach could Contributors: Sebastian Holst not ultimately succeed. In hindsight it is easy to see it was the simplicity of
[email protected] Web browsers that allowed it to monopolize content presentation on the (301) 548-4020 Girish Altekar Internet — everybody can use a Web browser, and everybody was the audi-
[email protected] ence the browser was (not entirely intentionally) designed for. (512) 478.3112 Mary Laplante
[email protected] In the case of content management systems there are many audiences, and (412) 264.8432 each of these may have specialized needs that go well beyond those of the Mike Maziarka
[email protected] content consumer. The success of a content management implementation (781) 871.9000 depends on its acceptance by authors, developers of different types, manag- Production Assistant: ers, and administrators.